The use of techniques typical of biology labs has been key to developing the ‘Salvem les fotos’ project, an initiative that processed 350,000 images affected by the DANA storm over 15 months at a total cost of €182,000, funded exclusively by private donors. The work of up to 130 volunteers and the involvement of their teachers have been crucial in recovering the visual record of thousands of people affected by the flood.

'Salvem les fotos' is an initiative of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Polytechnic University of Valencia that arose spontaneously thanks to the impetus of students taught by Esther Nebot, a professor in the Department of Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage. These students had just finished a course on photographic conservation a few days before the devastating DANA storm that ravaged the south of Valencia in October 2024. The flood swept family albums, framed photographs, and drawers overflowing with snapshots that immortalized significant moments in their owners' lives through the streets. The students, who lived in the affected areas, desperately waded through the submerged photographs—the very images they had been taught to protect—until the Faculty of Fine Arts invited those affected to hand over their damaged photos in an attempt to recover them and preserve their memories.

Residents who had watched the images of their lives vanish at the whim of the water handed over 350,000 more or less damaged photographs to the volunteers who offered to try to recover them. The first task was to identify the owner of each album and each image. An alphanumeric code was devised to associate each photo with its owner.

The photos arrived covered in mud; they had fallen in the sun but were still damp, with interwoven plant debris. The photos, a mixture of albumen, gelatin, and paper, were the perfect breeding ground for all kinds of fungi and bacteria. Environmental protection of the photographic documents was paramount. The intervention of Pilar Bosch, a graduate in Biological Sciences and professor in the Department of Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage at the Faculty of Fine Arts, was crucial. The volunteers encountered batches of up to a hundred photographs stuck together. To separate and clean them simultaneously, they used an anionic surfactant commonly used in the photographic industry, a non-ionic surfactant, and glycerin.

Once separated, they had to be dried. The originals were placed between blotting paper and cardboard and laid out to air dry. The sheer volume of material necessitated storing the packages in freezers. An American company lent half a dozen, a private individual another two, and so on, until a dozen freezers were used to preserve the material while the 80 to 130 students and volunteers who participated in the rescue worked on each photograph.

Bosch explains that to finish the cleaning, the photos had to be treated without wetting them: “We used hydrosols, applying essential oils to the images with ultrasonic pulse sprayers. The one that worked best was oregano.” The team bought several spray bottles of the type used in aromatherapy or for air fresheners, and once the photos were impregnated, the volunteers treated each one with cotton swabs to remove impurities. A problem arose. The volunteers, mostly young people, smelled an intense aroma of pizza as they impregnated the photos with oregano essence, and “it made them want to eat,” Nebot says.

The team organizers, led by Pilar Soriano, deputy director of the Conservation department, managed to hire all the volunteers as interns with a monthly stipend of 400 euros each and academic recognition for their service.

Nebot explains that in many cases they could only recover the digitized image of many photographs, “the memory,” because the original film stock was badly damaged. “When a photograph deteriorates significantly, the last surviving layer is yellowed,” she explains. Thus, many of the recovered photographs had yellow stains on the edges or in certain areas.

Once digitized, students from the Master's program in Artificial Intelligence and Image Recognition developed a tool to "clean" the photographs, which they called Rebrot. Among the instructions the tool follows, removing yellow stains is key. In the vast majority of cases, the results are excellent, but surprises also arise. The group of friends proudly showing off the paella they've just prepared and are about to eat finds that, after Rebrot's processing, the central element of the photo disappears: the paella is yellow, so it must be removed.

After 15 months of work, thousands of residents affected by the DANA storm have managed to recover the images that captured key moments of their lives. Of the 350,000 documented images, only about ten have been lost. All the work has been funded by private donations. Neither the Valencian Regional Government, nor the Ministry of Science and Technology, nor any other public administration has contributed a single euro. Chef José Andrés paid for the simple, neutral albums in which the photos were delivered to those affected. Each photo was mounted on paper with a support at each corner. The Barreiros Foundation contributed €20,000 at a time when the organizers of the project thought they would have to stop. The final cost was reduced, but only because the time donated by the students and their teachers was essential.